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This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.
Haruki Murakami -
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.
Haruki Murakami
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Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.
Haruki Murakami -
Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.
Haruki Murakami -
I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.
Haruki Murakami -
I contented myself with whiskey, for medicinal purposes. It helped numb my various aches and pains. Not that the alcohol actually reduced the pain; it just gave the pain a life of its own, apart from mine.
Haruki Murakami -
As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
Haruki Murakami -
That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
Haruki Murakami
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If you never noticed, it never happened.
Haruki Murakami -
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
Haruki Murakami -
A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.
Haruki Murakami -
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.
Haruki Murakami -
When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don't have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It's like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic.
Haruki Murakami -
Say it before you run out of time. Say it before it's too late. Say what you're feeling. Waiting is a mistake.
Haruki Murakami
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Sometimes it's not the people who change, it's the mask that falls off.
Haruki Murakami -
The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want us the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it.The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.
Haruki Murakami -
In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.
Haruki Murakami -
Understanding' is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings.
Haruki Murakami -
In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.
Haruki Murakami -
Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
Haruki Murakami
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Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.
Haruki Murakami -
Those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know--and everything I had to know. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were. That within the real world, a place like this existed. In the space of those ten seconds I became I tiny bird, fluttering in the air, the wind rushing by. From high in the sky I could see a scene far away. It was so far off I couldn't make it out clearly, yet something was there, and I knew that someday I would travel to that place.
Haruki Murakami -
Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.
Haruki Murakami -
You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?" "It's a distance that can't be measured." "Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's.
Haruki Murakami